Learn more about Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Where is the Unicode feed icon?

If you lived through the naughties, you know this icon: feed icon. It’s the universal icon for RSS/Atom feeds. It has its own Wikipedia page. It has its own (unofficial) website. Its SVG version is “one of the 100 most-used files on the English Wikipedia”.

And yet this icon does not exist in Unicode. There are much more frivolous icons in Unicode. The famous example is U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO, but there are much more questionable icons than that. Check out the pipeline for amusing examples. Why does the feed icon not exist in Unicode? The Unicode Consortium themselves use the icon on their homepage!

I’ve found one person who agrees with me: Victor Felder began this proposal last year, but did not submit it.

Unicode is proposal-driven. I’m going to work on a proposal for the feed icon. The Unicode Consortium has a page about proposals.

What can computers do? What are the limits of mathematics? And just how busy can a busy beaver be? This year, I’m writing Busy Beavers, a unique interactive book on computability theory. You and I will take a practical and modern approach to answering these questions — or at least learning why some questions are unanswerable!

It’s only $19, and you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

After months of secret toil, I and Andrew Carr released Everyday Data Science, a unique interactive online course! You’ll make the perfect glass of lemonade using Thompson sampling. You’ll lose weight with differential equations. And you might just qualify for the Olympics with a bit of statistics!

It’s $29, but you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

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